When block parties fill downtown Laconia this summer, attendees will flow freely between the live music stage, the craft beer pub on the corner, the restaurant down the street and the nearby shops.
The fencing that once sectioned off the beer garden from the rest of Main Street is no more. That’s because Laconia has turned its downtown neighborhood into a social district.
From noon to 9 p.m., Thursday through Saturday, participating bars and restaurants can sell alcohol to-go and customers can enjoy their pours on a stroll down the street, as long as they do so responsibly and within the district’s defined boundaries. There’s no outside alcohol or BYOB allowed, and sanctioned alcohol is sold in special cups.
It’s as if one big beer garden has grown over the heart of Laconia’s downtown.
When the Lakes Region hub approved this policy in April, it was the first one in the state to do so. Only two New Hampshire cities opted into a new state law legalizing this specific type of public alcohol consumption via ballot questions in November. The other one was Concord. Residents of Portsmouth, Keene and Nashua voted the idea down.
Concord voters signed off the idea of social districts in November by a 52%-48% split. However, the ballot question itself didn’t implement the change, just opened the door to it: a kind of ‘should we or shouldn’t we’ vote. To actually create social districts is a multi-part process.
With downtown’s biggest annual festival and a landmark Independence Day celebration now in the rear-view mirror, Concord is still a ways off from social districts. If the city council decides to move forward with them, there won’t be any in place before the end of the summer.
The city first needs to pass enabling language. City rules currently ban all public alcohol consumption, so officials need to put a carve-out on paper.
This carve-out, as well as the outline of a process for proposing new social districts, will go before the city council in August. There will be a public hearing on the new language.
Then the city has to create a plan for its social districts, which is when the details would get hammered out: Where would this big beer garden go? When would it be allowed? What’s the process for restaurants or festivals to get involved? How would safety be monitored and rules enforced? Should it be during standing weekly times or just during special events?
That second step has not yet begun in earnest, and it won’t until after the city council passes the rule change, according to City Solicitor John Conforti.
Concord’s Public Safety Advisory Board first discussed social districts briefly in January and continued discussions in the spring. A social districts subcommittee began meeting in April.
The public safety board as a whole endorsed a rule change, the first of the two parts for setting up districts, that will go before city councilors sometime in the next few months.
Festivals like Market Days were at the forefront of many minds last year, when city officials hustled to get a social districts question on the ballot in city elections, and in the months since voters gave the idea a thumbs up.
“Market Days was so much part of the conversation that people, when they voted for it on the ballot, it seemed they were essentially voting for Market Days to have it,” said Jessica Martin, executive director of Intown Concord, the nonprofit supporting liveliness, business and community downtown that organizes Market Days every year.
This was so much the case, Martin added, that people at the festival’s beer tents frequently asked about it. One man tried to walk out of the beer garden with his drink, assuming that the social district was already in effect, she said.
Intown saw Market Days as a strong candidate to try out a social district in Concord: With its well-established and marked boundaries, mostly daytime hours, street closures and existing presence of police and fire staff, much of the infrastructure and a low-risk culture for a social district would have already been in place.
“It’s already such a family-friendly event,” said Berit Brown, the organization’s head of events and marketing. “It could show that social districting doesn’t have to be this crazy party culture.” Rather, Intown saw it as a chance to boost businesses represented at the event – those selling drinks and vendors where people could shop with their families or friends, drink in hand.
With their eyes on June, Martin and her team drafted a proposal this past spring for what adopting a social district at the festival would look like. While the city’s social district subcommittee initially embraced it as a (not so dry) dry-run, officials eventually determined they legally couldn’t move forward with anything until the city ordinance was changed. The back-and-forth frustrated the organization.
“I was excited about the opportunity to be the first in the state to do it, and so was our board,” Martin said. “We thought that that was going to drive some really good press for our city.”
City Hall, she felt, didn’t share this eagerness to blaze the trail.
“There’s definitely a more cautious approach by some people,” she said, “a sense of, ‘We want to see how it goes in another community before we greenlight it.'”
While some on the social districts subcommittee have bristled at the pace of the project, and the amount of back-and-forth it has entailed, many of those reviewing the proposed rules for social districts have noted the importance of moving forward thoughtfully, ensuring that those who might have questions or concerns have ample opportunity to weigh in.
“It is not a race,” Mayor Byron Champlin said. “We want to make sure we do it right.”
When the city council debated putting a social districts question on the ballot last fall, there were both councilors and residents with reservations about what this kind of legal outdoor drinking would mean and how well it would be controlled.
As Champlin put it, being sensitive to concerns and intentional about how social districts would be set up outweighed the potential benefits and publicity of implementing them first. Each city that pursues social districts will do it in a way and at a pace that makes sense for its residents.
“I don’t think we have a need that a city like Laconia has, where they have a dormant downtown and want to try to revitalize it,” he said.
Moreover, the timeline to get a rule change drafted, posted for public hearing and then voted on by the council was already tight by the time the city took up the social districts conversation in the spring. The city usually notices hearings one month in advance, so passing social district rules ahead of Market Days in June would have meant sending a final draft to the city council around the end of April.
The proposed rule change OK-ed by the public safety board in June is largely administrative: It would allow for the possibility of social districts under Concord’s ordinances, and it notes that applications for the creation of specific districts would go to the public safety board for its review before also being reviewed by the city council.
Champlin perceives his fellow council members to be largely supportive of social districts as a whole, while having more disagreements about what they should look like.
It’s not clear what the debate about the details of the potential districts will look like or when that process would begin.
So far, city officials discussing social districts have leaned toward the idea of more event-based or pop-up social districts, rather than something akin to the standing Thursday-through-Saturday arrangement in Laconia.
In the lakes city, the move so far has been a seamless transition and a success, per City Manager Kirk Beattie. There have been no arrests and few issues with rule-breaking. One person who thought the rules allowed for BYOB was cooperative when they learned this was not the case, he said. Because the zones don’t extend to the Weirs Beach area, speculation online about what would happen during the city’s busy Motorcycle Week proved misplaced.
Laconia passed its rule change and implemented the details for its district in one fell swoop at the end of April. The district first opened a month later, in time for Memorial Day weekend.
Laconia moved relatively quickly, without many mixed feelings among its officials.
“The council was on board from the beginning,” said Beattie. At the same time, he didn’t feel it was rushed. “It wasn’t one meeting, here you go, here’s the plan.”
Beattie said his staff started planning for social districts shortly after the November elections. Also working under the umbrella of a committee, they took in feedback from business owners and held public discussions and hearings before putting their policy in place.
In the six weeks or so since the social districts started, the Laconia city council agreed to extend hours from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m., to align with the end times of a summer concert series. They’ve also installed permanent signage at the boundaries of their district.
While customers are participating, Laconia’s Main Street doesn’t have a completely different feel after the rule change. Its events, like the fall’s pumpkin festival, are where Beattie expects to see the biggest contrast.
“As we start having more events,” Beattie added, “you’ll start to see the difference.”
From Beattie’s perspective, the greatest benefit of the change so far has been the attention it’s brought.
“There’s so much conversation around it, it feels like it’s really drawing people in,” he said.
